Analysis for 'Tremor Video'

Integral Ad Science will provide its video viewability targeting segments to AudienceScience for inclusion in the company’s Helios Advertising Enterprise Advertising Software, the companies announced today. AudienceScience clients will be able to build campaigns that include specific video viewability levels based on Integral Ad Science’s data.

Tremor Video released data gleaned from 40 billion ad calls in its premium video marketplace, finding, among other things, that 7 out of 10 advertisers are now buying multi-screen campaigns. That’s a bit higher than the 58% Videology reported for Q1 ’15 back in May based on its data.

Both data points illustrate how aggressively advertisers are embracing both online video and mobile video advertising. Mobile in particular now accounts for 50% or more views on many popular sites, including YouTube, making a mobile component mandatory.

Programmatic is one of the most important trends in the online video advertising industry, with eMarketer forecasting that in 2016 nearly $4 billion of online video advertising will be transacted programmatically. At last month’s Video Ad Summit, one of our sessions focused on programmatic video advertising from the advertiser/buy side and another from the content provider/sell side.

The session videos are included below. Taken together they provide a wealth of insights about where programmatic video advertising is today, the key opportunities and challenges for advertisers and content providers, what’s ahead, plus lots more.

Varick Media Management, which specializes in programmatic ad buying, has chosen Tremor Video's demand side platform, powered by VideoHub, as its preferred partner for premium programmatic campaigns. Neeraj Kochhar, Managing Director of Buy-side Platforms at Tremor Video, told me that it's the first big agency that's been announced as a VideoHub DSP customer, though others are using the platform as well.

Super Bowl XLIX will go into the books as one of the most exciting ever, full of unexpected twists and turns, right up until the last few seconds of the game. Importantly, the Super Bowl experience continues to change, with streaming, extended online ad viewing and social sharing. Below I've rounded up the most relevant data I could find about these trends. If I've missed anything, please let me know.

As devices continue to proliferate, reaching viewers across multiple screens is becoming an imperative for advertisers. At the recent Video Ad Summit, one of our sessions focused on how advertisers are beginning to do this and what challenges remain. Participants included Larry Adams (Mindshare), Josh Chasin (comScore), Rob Holmes (Comcast), Chuck Parker (Brightcove), Katie Seitz (Tremor), with moderator Jeff Lanctot (Mixpo).

The traditional narrative around online/over-the-top video is that it will incent cord-cutting and cord-nevering. But now, in a twist, instead of a looming battle between OTT and pay-TV, it could well be that we're on the brink of a new era of cooperation between the two, which could have profound implications for everyone in the video ecosystem.

Stepping back for a moment, pay-TV operators have always been in the business of improving the delivery of available video and packaging it into bundles. Initially operators distributed broadcast channels and then in the 70's and 80's, with the advent of satellite delivery, operators began bundling "cable" channels as well (e.g. ESPN, MTV, CNN, USA, etc.).

As I explained earlier this week, the success of AOL-Adap.tv is riding on 3 key market trends, the shift from linear TV style viewing to anywhere/anytime/any device viewing, the democratization of video production and distribution which has led to a plethora of online originals, and the influence of technology in the ad buying/selling process. AOL is seeking to capitalize on all this through Adap.tv's programmatic platform.

Meanwhile Tremor Video, whose stock has had a bumpy start since the company went public in early July, posted a strong 2nd quarter, with revenue growing by 41% year-over-year. As CEO Bill Day explained on the earnings call, key to this was a focus on premium performance-based in-stream video advertising, which grew from 20% of revenue in Q2 '12 to 34% in Q2 '13. Mobile was also a big contributor to the quarter, rising from 4% of revenue to 13% of revenue. Bill noted the company is highly focused on providing transparency and analytics around traditional brand metrics such as brand lift, engagement, completion rates, etc. to engage buyers.

More broadly, as Colin observes, online video is giving brands and content providers more flexibility to insert product placements and other deep product integration. I agree, though for the foreseeable future, I see the vast majority of online video ad revenue coming from more traditional pre-, mid- and post-roll advertising.

Tremor Video's VideoHub technology has received Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for its video viewability metric and 4 of its other metrics. The accreditations are another milestone for online video advertising in moving from a "Wild West" to delivering assured campaign data to advertisers, agencies and content providers. MRC is an independent industry organization focused on validated audience measurement services.

With billions of video streams now being viewed each month, across an ever-growing array of devices, consumers' expectations are higher than ever that video is a part of the storytelling mix. For print publications like magazines and newspapers, that's creating a massive new opportunity to re-imagine their businesses, better connect with their audiences and pursue a new vein of ad spending.

To get a better sense of why video is so strategic for magazines, last week I spoke with Lauren Wiener, who 6 weeks ago became president of global sales and marketing at Tremor Video, after spending 9 years at Meredith Corp, most recently as SVP of Digital. Meredith has been among the most active magazine publishers with video through its Meredith Video Studios business. The unit creates original video that is syndicated to YouTube and other online outlets along with VOD, and provides videos to Meredith's numerous magazines' online properties.

Tremor Video announced earlier today that in June it served 98.3% of its in-stream video ads in players that were 400 pixels or bigger. Tremor has found that the bigger-sized players drive double the engagement rate and also boost completion rates for ads. Based on its own analytics, Tremor found that for ads appearing in 400-500 pixel players, 62% of viewers watched to completion and for ads appearing in a 500-700 pixel player, completion jumped to 75%.

Tremor believes that as player sizes get bigger the viewing experience becomes more TV-like, therefore inducing users to relax and be more prone to sit through ads. Looking ahead, this bodes well for ads on connected TVs, where the content and ads are seen in full screen. Tremor said that it is advising publishing partners to increase the size of their players in order to deliver improved ad performance.

There were 4 separate research studies released yesterday from important video technology providers, all pointing to continued change and growth in video viewership and monetization. Below I've shared key highlights from each, along with links to obtain the original research.

Tremor Video is announcing later this morning that its Video Hub in-stream video ad analytics platform is now available for brands and agencies to license for use with any 3rd party ad server, ad network or publisher. Tremor unveiled Video Hub in May and since then over 200 brands and agencies have used it with Tremor's own ad server on its ad network as the company finished up development. Anthony Risicato, Tremor's GM for Video Hub told me last week that reactions from these early users have been positive and they've been eager to expand their use of Video Hub to also track and measure the effectiveness of non-Tremor elements of their video ad campaigns.

At the ELEVATE conference on Tuesday a number of our partners made product and partnership announcements which I mentioned were coming in a teaser last Friday. Each helps move the online video advertising market forward in different ways. A brief recap of each follows:

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